POLITICS
MAC deputy minister quits
The Presidential Office yesterday said that it had agreed to the resignation of Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) Deputy Minister Wu Mei-hung (吳美紅). Her resignation is to take effect on Dec. 2. Wu said she was resigning due to her career plans, and she had wanted to resign during the summer when the legislature was in recess to allow her successor time to settle into the job. She expressed her intention to resign to MAC Minister Andrew Hsia (夏立言) at the time, but had to wait because a scheduled meeting between Hsia and China’s Taiwan Affairs Office Minister Zhang Zhijun (張志軍) was delayed until the middle of last month.
RETAIL
MyDay, 7-Eleven team up
The nation’s largest convenience store chain, 7-Eleven, said yesterday it would cooperate with shopping Web site MyDay to have online purchases from overseas delivered to its 5,000-plus outlets. The convenience store said it would introduce the delivery service today, allowing shoppers on MyDay to have their purchases delivered from Japan, the US and South Korea in five days or more. Myday has more than a decade of experience in cross-border shopping services and it also partners with other sites such as Amazon in the US, Rakuten in Japan and Gmarket in South Korea, 7-Eleven said. It is the second convenience store chain to offer such a service, following FamilyMart, which established a similar partnership with Japanese Web site Tenso in September. Members of Tenso can have their purchases delivered to FamilyMart stores in about six days. More than 43 percent of Taiwanese online shoppers buy products on overseas sites six times a year, according to a 2013 survey.
SPORTS
Su Li-chiung to head Games
Taipei City Government Secretary-General Su Li-chiung (蘇麗瓊) has been named chief executive of the 29th Summer Universiade, which is to be held in the capital from Aug. 19 to Aug. 30, 2017, city government spokesman Lin Ho-ming (林鶴明) said on Monday. Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) gave Su the job because he wants someone who can continue to oversee personnel affairs and still be able to immediately begin work organizing the international sports event, Lin said. The 2017 Universiade is to be the largest international sports event the nation has hosted. Su said the mayor needs someone capable of coordinating the efforts of various city government departments. The city government was due to issue a personnel order about her appointment yesterday, Su said. Su participated on the organizing committee for the Kaohsiung World Games in 2009.
IMMIGRATION
Two Georgians deported
Two Georgians were deported on Monday after they were caught using fake passports at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport, the National Immigration Agency said. The two men were transiting through Taiwan on false Estonian passports, awaiting a flight bound for Canada on Sunday when they were stopped by immigration officers, the agency said. After officers found Georgian passports in the pockets of their backpacks, the two men admitted that they had spent US$2,500 each to acquire the fake Estonian passports in Istanbul, Turkey. The two men claimed to be Internet hardware engineers from Georgia and said they planned to find work in Canada, where Estonian passport holders can enter without a visa, the agency said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching